If On A Winter’s Night A Linker

September 30, 2007 — Niall

John Clute’s “Fantastika in the World Storm“, a lecture delivered in Prague earlier this month. Possibly notable for including a four-stage model of sf to go with the models of fantasy and horror outlined in the Encyclopedia of Fantasy and The Darkening Garden, respectively; at least, I think it’s the first time I’ve seen such a model written down:

Science Fiction. The basic premise is that the world depicted has an arguable relation to the history of the real world. The underlying impulse of twentieth century SF has been to view the world in this manner in order to see what’s wrong; and then fixing it. SF is the most optimisitc of genres. SF bronco-busts the world. It rides the world storm. I’ve cobbled a narrative model for SF out of other writers’ work. Though it uses a different terminology, this model closely resembles an earlier model constructed by Farah Mendlesohn for similar reasons in her essay, Is There Any Such a Thing as Children’s Fiction: A Position Piece (2004):

Novum. Darko Suvin’s term for that aspect of the SF world which differs measurably from our given world.

Cognitive Estrangement. Suvin’s term — modified from Vikor Shklovsky and Bertolt Brecht — for arguable and therefore structured defamiliarization of the world, which derives in part from the fact of Novum, and which allows the defectiveness of the ruling paradigm to be seen whole.

Conceptual Breakthrough. Peter Nicholls’s term, from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1979), for the thrust of release when a defective paradigm collapses and the new world — the true world — is revealed. A sense of wonder is often felt, sometimes in spaceships.

Topia (U- or Dys-). The Jerusalem whose gates have been opened by conceptual breakthrough for those who have won through. From this point life is going to be led in accordance with the truths discovered.

Matt Cheney reports from a Jonathan Lethem/PKD event, and has the lineup of the next Library of America Dick volume: Martian Time-Slip, Dr. Bloodmoney, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, A Scanner Darkly, and Now Wait for Last Year